Emporio Armani Men's Touchscreen Connected Smartwatch

Product Information

Smartwatches need to look good, and as luxury brands enter the market, we find they end up producing some of the best-looking wearables. One of the latest is the Emporio Armani Connected, Armani’s first Android Wear 2.0 smartwatch. It’s unquestionably attractive, with a name that oozes class, style, and sophistication. In our Emporio Armani Connected review, we see if the watch is all style and no substance, and if it is, whether it really matters. Understated and stylish Just like anything with the name Armani attached to it, wearing the Emporio Armani Connected smartwatch is about the way it makes you feel, and not what it actually does. Having a “bare essentials” feature list means the tech-smarts don’t overshadow the sophisticated style.

Elsewhere, there’s built-in GPS (supposedly, more on that in the section below), heart rate monitoring, waterproofing up to 5 ATM, and you can use Google Pay with it. Typical stuff for a smartwatch in this age and most of it works well and efficiently. We're sure these kinds of gripes won't bother every user, because you can get by with Wear OS – and there are still nice integrations with Google Pay, notifications and customizable watch faces. As we show above, that screen can once again be set to always-on, with a touch on the screen or a wrist-raise lighting things up in more detail. This is one of the few things Wear watches beat rivals to the punch on, and it still works great. Android Wear is the wearable operating system from Google, and this year the company introduced version 2.0, which introduced many new and important features to the platform — from the Google Play Store and access to the Google Assistant, to a simplified design. Nearly all Android Wear 2.0 watches will feature the same software — the user interface isn’t different on each watch unlike Android phones. Manufacturers can, however, create micro apps that personalize the watch closer to the brand. Something new to the party, meanwhile, is the speaker on the left side of the bezel. While the device doesn't offer 4G/LTE capabilities, it does let you take calls from the watch.With slight improvements on what was already a great looking design, the look of this smartwatch is undoubtedly its strongest area.

It comes in two color variants- navy blue and silver tones and is made from stainless steel. It also comes with a touchscreen and features a blue dial with a full display. It is complemented by a gold stainless-steel H-link bracelet. And then cringe as the GPS utterly fails for a few minutes because you left your phone at home and made the mistake of assuming the GPS wasn't entirely dependent on it. The screen itself is a 1.28-inch AMOLED display offering a 390 x 390 resolution with 328 pixels-per-inch. It looks sharp, with the default watch face being as understated as the rest of the design.For years, battery life has been the same equation on Wear OS watches. And while you still won't be getting multiple days of life between charges, battery efficiency has improved on the Smartwatch 3 from last year's model. Thankfully, the heart rate sensor on the underside of the watch was more reliable in testing. The above example is fairly indicative of what we found in three test runs against the Fitbit Versa 2. While last year's model slightly over-reported average heart rate, this time around it was always within 1-2 bpm, or, as above, right in line with the Versa. The Emporio Armani Smartwatch 3 isn't the first Wear OS watch to have this issue recently, but it is an expensive one to have such a critical fitness related flaw. However, it's possible this is just a bug, as the watch supposedly has GPS built in.